Many companies provide help agents for customers of their products. In such cases, customers call, and navigate through a menu tree of an automatic telephone system attendant, to access an appropriate agent, by pushing dial buttons on a dial tone multifrequency (DTMF) telephone. If the agent is free, the telephone system routes the call to the agent. If the agent is not free, the caller is placed on hold, and the call is answered by the agent in first in-first out sequence.
Some such systems allow a callback indication to be placed in a queue, so that when an appropriate agent becomes free, the caller will be called back in turn. The callback number is stored by the caller keying in the callback number using the telephone keypad.
Such prior art systems do not allow the storage of a voice message, which may help the follow-up sequence to a significant extent. For example, the problem of the caller may have been solved by another person, and the caller wishes to leave a message not to call back. The prior art systems make this impossible, and indeed a callback may cause the storage of another callback entry, wasting valuable memory space, and placing an inaccurate callback list burden on the agent.
The caller in a callback may only wish to leave pertinent information regarding the product discussed in the original call. The caller may not have the time to wait in a long hold queue for the agent to become free, and in prior art systems cannot leave the pertinent information. The agent may be prompted to call back the caller, but may not have the time to do so for several days. Thus there is significant delay introduced before the agent can even begin to solve the problem for which the caller originally called.